Say what you will, it is the cause of all the sectional prejudice and
hatred ever engendered in this country. Thousands of millions of money and
hundreds of thousands of lives of good white men have been sacrificed in
the solution of the Negro problem for this country, and still it hangs
over us the darkest cloud that obscures the bright vision of peace and
good will to all men. And as the biologists say, "He stands out in his
dark isolation a perpetual challenge to the dogma of the unity of the
races." We understand him as a slave. In that capacity he filled every
expectation that could be required of him, always reflecting the character
of his master. If the master was very religious, so was he. If the master
was a drunkard and a sinner, so was he. Always a good imitator, but never
an originator. He liked to be flattered and honored and was always
faithful to every special trust. When kindly treated he loved his master
like a child. These were the conditions that the discipline of slavery
obtained. Now his status has changed and all personal restraints are
removed and strict discipline stopped. He is now thrown upon his own
resources, and must stand upon his own merits. He is now inclined to
neglect the patient, hard-earned virtues of the whites, and to imitate
their easy vices. He is handicapped at every turn by race prejudices. The
professions in most places are closed to him. He is not wanted anywhere
except as a cheap hewer of wood and drawer of water. All intelligent white
labor resent his competition, even in the humblest work. White lawyers and
doctors get some pickings out of him, and where he is numerous white
merchants have a good pull on him. All who are getting anything out of him
are willing to tolerate him. All who get nothing out of him would gladly
see him deported. Wherever he gets a foothold in country or city he
depreciates real estate by making conditions more or less intolerable. He
is a prolific subject for religious fanatics and cranks to practice upon.
He is an alien here in his native country among his own people. He is the
only man in all the world ashamed of himself and his color. His greatest
ambition is to be evoluted into a white man, and he wants to start right
now, and so long as that boon is denied him will he be an aggressive
alien. Since the old masters and old servants have passed away there is no
friendship or kind interest between their descendants, and the gulf is
widening all the while. This great country, leading the vanguard of
civilization for all the world, must do justice to all men. Now what can
we do with the Negro? Shall we keep him here a standing menace and a
perpetual challenge to mob law, and increase our police force, or deport
him and sustain a strictly white man's country. If we deport him as fast
as Europeans come in, we would soon be done with him as a factor in
politics and labor; but as yet we have no place to send him. Through
industrial and commercial relations we will soon absorb Mexico and the
Central American States, and upon the completion of the Panama Canal we
can expand rapidly into South America, where there is a vast area of
unsettled country that would make an ideal Negro country--throughout all
of the Amazon River country territory could be procured for the
colonization of all our Negroes under the fostering care of the United
States, where the black man may hold all the offices and fulfill all the
functions of complete citizenship, with close commercial relations in the
exchange of products. I have been taxed forty years for freeing him, and
would consent to be taxed forty years more to remove him to such a
paradise as herein suggested.
We want the Chinese excluded because they are too docile and carry a head
of their own. Then we want the Jap excluded because he is too smart for us
to compete with. When we lose a few million white men fighting Japan, as
we will have to do soon, as they swarm over here, dictating how they shall
be treated, then the white man's burden will be pretty heavy with the
colored problem, and a general house-cleaning may follow that will purify
the political atmosphere somewhat.
In the meantime all of our great, soulless corporations, transportation
and manufacturing companies regard all "coons alike," whether they be
white, black, yellow, brown or ring-streaked or striped. They exploit them
for what profit there is in them without regard to the interest of the
present or future generations. What did it matter to the Pharaohs what was
to be the future of their country, so long as they had plenty of slaves to
rear gigantic pyramids to their own selfish ambition.
In peace or war, where is the town that would have Negro troops quartered
in it, for fear at any time they be offended, shoot up the town and
massacre the women and children? Anywhere in this country that the Negro
is denied full social rights, he stands offended and ready to enact any
tragedy that promises to advance his social position. The whites must
decide whether they shall warm him in their bosoms or cast him off.
Nothing has ever been more firmly implanted in the human breast than race
prejudice. No first-class white man can feel at ease on social equality
with the colored races.